Posted on 01/10/2009 5:12:25 AM PST by Kaslin
It’s official: President-elect Barack Obama’s two daughters are attending Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.
The decision comes as no surprise. That elite private school launched former first daughter Chelsea Clinton on the path to success years ago. And the Obama girls are certainly used to attending a private school.
The Obamas steered clear of the Chicago’s failing public schools, where 34 percent of the students fail state reading tests and only about half the pupils graduate from high school. So there was never any reason to expect the Obama family to subject Sasha and Malia to D.C.’s failing public schools.
Yet as president, Obama will have some promises to keep. Not only to his daughters, but to all Americans. During his campaign, he vowed, “We cannot be satisfied until every child in America -- I mean every child -- has the same chance for a good education that we want for our own children.” And the best way to give students that chance is to give their parents a choice.
If parents were allowed to pick their children’s school (as the Obamas have now done twice), they’d pick the best available school, not merely the one that happens to be in their neighborhood.
Obama’s decision should serve as a teaching moment for his administration’s education policymakers. Lesson number one would be that spending doesn’t equate to success.
D.C. spends some $14,000 annually on each child in its public schools. A lot of that funding comes from the federal treasury, which means all American taxpayers are subsidizing the D.C. public schools. That’s one of the highest per-pupil costs in the nation. Yet if the District were a state, it would rank 51st -- dead last -- in test scores.
To address these failings, Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program four years ago. The plan provides low-income children the chance to attend a school of their parents’ choice. Some 1,900 disadvantaged children now attend private schools in the District.
Parents are happier with the schools they’ve picked, and the students are making progress, too. A testing evaluation shows that participating students scored higher than their peers who remained in public school.
Sadly, candidate Obama seemed to be leaning in the wrong direction. “What I do oppose,” he told the American Federation of Teachers, “is spending public money for private school vouchers. We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”
Yet real reform would involve expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program so that all children in the District can have the chance to attend a safe and effective school. That’s not “throwing up our hands.” That’s doing something. Something other than simply throwing more money at a problem. We’d be expanding a successful program, so students could attend better schools and their parents could be more involved in their education.
The Obamas are already a role model for this, of course. They arrive in D.C. as an intact family, and both Barack and Michelle are clearly involved in their children’s education. The key is to take this to the next level by making school choice available to all parents in the nation’s capital.
Powerful politicians of all stripes routinely exercise school choice. A recent survey of Congress found that 37 percent of representatives and 45 percent of senators had sent at least one child to private school. The Obama administration could pave the way for a better education system nationwide by extending school choice to those less fortunate than Washington’s elite power brokers.
That would be a change Americans deserve.
Obama says, “We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”
You mean like you did, Obama? If you have so much confidece that you can fix the public school system, why don’t you put *YOUR* children in there?
Hypocrite.
We will continue to school our children at home, as long as God gives us the breath and strength to do so.
Hopefully, at this prestigous school, they’ll learn not to say “ya know & um repeatedly!!!
Sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, as granny used to say...
Vouchers are unnecessary if we get the Feds out of the education business, all together. Education should be a local issue, and literacy testing should be up to employers if such is a requirement of the job to which the applicant aspires.
And what's stopping them? Other then the lack of another massive government handout, I mean?
Doubtful. I don't think Caroline Kennedy went to PS104 and look how eloquent she is.
Where I live, about 50% of public school teachers send their kids to private schools. Obviously, they know something about their lousy product....enough to protect their kids from it. The Obama’s know it too, but they’ve got a debt to pay to the unions. That is a higher priority to him than America’s children.
Reforming public schools is a waste of time. The problem is far too fundamental, as it is related to the way in which we school our children in this country, and our strange belief that "education" can be quantified in standardized testing.
> Reforming public schools is a waste of time.
Exactly.
Repeating a process while expecting different results is the textbook definition of insanity.
I'm sure there is a much more powerful statistic that Mr. Fuelner could be quoting and that would be: how many representatives and how many senators have sent their own children to a DC public school? I'm sure the author was just trying to be gentle in his criticism.
When are we going to learn to sell this approach properly. To wit:
Providing a voucher INCREASES the PER-STUDENT FUNDING of those that don’t take the voucher. This needs to part of any discussion, as it undercuts the biggest complaint of the Luddites, that vouchers remove resources from the current system.
For example: I have 22 students per class and am spending $10,000 per student. I am spending $220,000 per class.
I give 2 students a $6,000 voucher to use elsewhere. I now have left 20 students and $208,000 left. I have solved TWO problems. Spending is now $10,400 per student AND I HAVE DECREASED the CLASS SIZE!
I have solved both of the public system’s WET DREAMS by using a voucher.
Remember this mantra:
Vouchers increase spending per student in the public schools while decreasing class size.
Vouchers increase spending per student in the public schools while decreasing class size.
Vouchers increase spending per student in the public schools while decreasing class size.
Vouchers increase spending per student in the public schools while decreasing class size.
Vouchers increase spending per student in the public schools while decreasing class size.
First, I am not for vouchers. I’m for getting government out of education entirely. If a group of people wants to form a school collective, they are perfectly free to do so at their own expense. They are not free to compell me to pay for it by threat of force.
Second, given your hypothesis, I don’t understand the teachers’ union opposition too vouchers, unless they’re dumber than their students.
What’s stopping a lot of parents is the fact that the funding for education is forcefully taken from the parents and sent off to the teachers union employees, leaving the parents short of money to educate their children elsewhere.
So should we give any DC resident who wants it $30,000 a year to send their kid to Sidwell Friends?
And what's stopping them? Other then the lack of another massive government handout, I mean?
How about the 6000 per year in property taxes that I paid on my 200K house? Give me my money back and I will put the kids in private school.
I have friends who are public school teachers and they send their kids to private school as well. They each told me it wasn’t because they didn’t have faith in the teachers at the primary school level, but they were afraid of what their children would be subjected to and exposed to socially. Keeping their children out of the environment infested with gang-bangers was their primary motive.
And I don't have a proble with something like that. If any state or local government launches a program that says any person who sends their kids to public schools should get a rebate equivilent to the amount of their tax dollars that would have gone to those schools I would support it in a heartbeat. But the average voucher touter isn't talking about that. They want thousands of dollars above what they pay in taxes in order to send their kids to the school of their choice. By my way of thinking that's nothing more or less than a government handout and I'm opposed to it.
How did you come up with that?
“they were afraid of what their children would be subjected to and exposed to socially.”
How unlike my parents who refused to homeschool me because they wanted me to socialize. And get straight A’s, and have a boyfriend, and save the world....
That's what the news said tuition for Obama's youngest was, $28 thousand and change. Tuition for the older one is higher.
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